Last month, High Road was proud to attend the unveiling of The Ottawa Hospital’s brand new website.

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) worked with High Road to enhance the way it digitally supports its patients and community. The Hospital’s vision is to “provide world-class care, exceptional service and compassion we would want for our loved ones”, and High Road’s innovative and personalized approach to online communications helped bring this vision to life.

The hospital has three campuses in Ottawa serving 1.2 million Ontario residents. Although the name implies a local hospital, TOH reaches more than just the Ottawa community, with 1,172 beds, a research institute, a foundation and more than 26 departments, including a renowned Cancer Program.

This was a challenging, but incredibly important project for us.

High Road’s objective: to create a seamless, integrated online experience for a diverse number of audiences. The result: a website that connects The Ottawa Hospital brand with patients and its partners at the Research Institute and The Foundation, as well as the more than 26 departments, programs, services and clinics.

From the beginning of the project, TOH’s vision guided High Road’s research into the field of patient care, healthcare and overall communications in this sector. We met with a diverse range of stakeholders, both internal and external, ranging from physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, to patients, volunteers, and other supporters. These conversations helped our team understand what everyone needed the website to provide: adequate and engaging resources as well as support.

A best-practices review of leading hospital web sites and social media properties also helped us set strategic priorities to promote awareness and support for the hospital’s new vision, and raise the overall profile of its clinical departments and programs.

The hospital’s website, www.ottawahospital.on.ca, is now very welcoming and designed to meet both of the patients’ and visitors’ needs.

Here is a quick snapshot of some of the new features:

• The website is fully accessible and enriched with well-organized information;
• Interactive campus maps are used to profile directions, parking and overall accessibility;
• Visitors can now connect with appropriate departments seamlessly via a searchable directory;
• Family physicians, healthcare specialists and visitors can browse TOH’s physician directory to direct their questions accordingly;
• Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been introduced, allowing TOH to stay connected to the healthcare community and offer up news updates and announcements to the public.

We worked very closely with TOH’s internal technical team and their partners to integrate the design and site structure into a new content management system (CMS) that now allows TOH to manage online communications effectively across all departments.

Congratulations to The Ottawa Hospital for having launched such a demanding project.

The final product looks great (and we are excited to see it evolve over time)!